


The Way a Home Breathes

by vulcansmirk



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Coda, Episode: s08e23 Sacrifice, Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-04
Updated: 2013-07-04
Packaged: 2017-12-17 15:46:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 929
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/869228
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vulcansmirk/pseuds/vulcansmirk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Weeks after all the angels fell from Heaven, Cas finally finds his way home. Set after "Sacrifice."</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Way a Home Breathes

Dean awoke in the ghostly hours, but he couldn’t say what woke him. The air was filled with ink; a draft whistled out of some mysterious corner of the bunker, and metal walls groaned beneath the weight of Kansas soil. As Dean had slept, that strange noisy quiet of the depths of night had enveloped the room, and it seemed for all the world completely uninterrupted. But something had woken him.

A cold fist of dread settled in Dean’s stomach, familiar from years of spirit-hunting and monster-killing, but it gave a new and painful twist at the thought that this wasn’t some stranger’s house, and that it wasn’t just Sam who needed protecting, but Kevin too, and  _their home,_  and all the ancient secrets of the Men of Letters. Dean sat up, slid slowly and carefully out of bed, and dug his roots deeper into the hard floor beneath him. He glided out of the room.

Through the hall and down the stairs, and Dean was in the war room. The ceiling loomed high above him, and currents of cool air buffeted his arms like the breaths of a million tiny invisible things. Maybe these were the breaths of Sam and Kevin, both asleep in their rooms in the floors above. Dean felt their heartbeats in the walls, and they steadied him.

He didn’t quite hear the noise – wasn’t even sure there was a noise – but he felt it, like a prickle across his skin. Like all those tiny invisible things had suddenly latched on and skittered down his arms, buzzing and frantic. Dean felt himself moving toward the front door.

He should have known, of course. And maybe he did, in a way; he just didn’t believe, so he’d allowed himself to forget what he knew. But he had to believe what was right in front of his eyes, and when Dean opened the door to the bunker – softly, warily, tensed against the monsters on the other side – he saw Cas.

 

“Hello, Dean,” Cas said. The small sound was too large in the quiet. It bounced off the walls and muffled the heartbeats of the men upstairs. Dean gripped the door, couldn’t see his knuckles, but knew they were turning white. Could feel his arm shaking, and his veins popping. He couldn’t blink; he couldn’t breathe.

Cas’s trenchcoat was gone. His jacket, his slacks, his backwards tie, his once-immaculate white dress shirt were all covered in dried mud, and the skies were clear now but Dean remembered the storm of that night, the pouring rain, the tears of the angels. He remembered the incandescent corpses raining down from angry skies, and he thought he saw scorchmarks on Castiel’s clothes, amid the dirt. Maybe they were shaped like feathers.

When Dean started to feel light-headed, he remembered to breathe, and when he remembered to breathe, he managed to take half a step to the side, signaling Castiel to enter. He felt an instant’s relief that he and Sam had thought to lay traps and wards around the entrance, so that a monster or a demon parading around in Castiel’s meatsuit wouldn’t trick a thunderstruck Dean into allowing it entrance. Not that Dean ever expected this.

Cas stepped inside, and Dean shut the door. Ink poured in to displace moonlight. The righteous man and the fallen angel stood for a moment, listening as the bunker breathed.

Cas broke the silence.

“Dean,” he croaked, and then, “Dean, I,” and only then did Dean take in Castiel’s hunched shoulders, his downcast eyes, his trembling.

With a horrible, stomach-clenching certainty, Dean knew. He understood. He couldn’t bring himself to speak.

Cas’s lips pinched into a line. He glanced up with eyes too bright, and too blue. And Dean unclenched his fists, breathed in tandem with the walls, let his heart settle into the steady rhythm of Sam’s and Kevin’s in their blissful rest. He reached out, hand shaking infinitesimally, and slid his fingers around Cas’s arm. Willed Cas’s heart to slow, too. It fluttered so weakly.

At the touch of Dean’s hand, Cas looked horrified, stared for a beat as though Dean were something venomous. But he drew a hand up to meet it, a hand caked in weeks of sweat and grime, and squeezed with such force that Dean felt it in the middle of his chest. Cas’s head fell forward, and his shoulders began heaving. Dean felt that in his chest, too. When Dean tugged Cas in close, he felt everything – the loneliness, the uncertainty, the grief, the betrayal, the guilt. Castiel folded against him, as small and as fragile as a flightless bird, and Dean felt the wintry cold of Castiel’s too-human soul as though it were his own. Cas dug desperate fingers into Dean’s shirt, buried his face in Dean’s neck (and Cas was ashamed to show his face, and he was ashamed to come so close), and Dean wrapped his arms around Cas’s rickety frame and held on tight.

They stood for a long while, and as they stood, Cas’s skin was slowly leached of ice. With the constant weight of Castiel’s grief in the back of his mind, Dean began thinking of warm showers, clean clothes, and soft beds. Maybe he would give Cas one of his old T-shirts for the night. Maybe he’d give Cas his bed.

And what about tomorrow? Dean couldn’t begin to speculate. But as he tightened his grip around the body in his arms, for the first time in what felt like a very long while, Dean allowed himself to feel relief.


End file.
